Warner bros, p.17
Warner Bros, page 17
Streetcar’s success encouraged wary talk of filming the play. That led to such fears of censorship that one mogul, Louis B. Mayer (father to the play’s producer, Irene Selznick), had said everything would be all right if somehow the story could be given a happy ending. Lillian Hellman actually wrote such a script before Kazan reworked the Williams screenplay. With Charles Feldman as producer—a brilliant man, but seldom trusted—the picture was set up at Warners, with Kazan persuading himself that its integrity would be honored there. He made only one concession: Jessica Tandy, the stage Blanche, would be replaced by the starrier Vivien Leigh (who had played Blanche in London).
The film was shot and cut. There was a preview with some audience laughter at the wrong moments, so Kazan reedited to eliminate those spots. He was trying to stay on good terms with Jack Warner, though he feared Feldman was talking behind his back. But all parties were fearful of censorship. The Breen Office had recommended that Blanche “be searching for romance and security, and not for gross sex.”11 But a little bit of gross sex was edging into the mainstream, or seeming normal. Kazan told Jack, “I just saw [the film] again and I liked it. You will have your own impression, of course, but I thought it completely clean. Whatever there is of sex and violence is truthfully done, never exploited or sensationalized. And, I think it is full of the very Christian feeling of compassion and charity.”12
Jack assented, but Kazan knew very well that in 1947–51, the point of Tennessee Williams in America was not exactly to be clean or Christian; it was to turn over and freshen the hard, dry soil of our desire. The purpose was to shed poetry’s light on behavior that had been subject to official repression, and widespread public ignorance—that was not so far from the revelation of Cody Jarrett in White Heat. So Kazan talked to Jack.
“I want your word,” he said, “that this picture goes out as it is now. It’s two hours and fourteen minutes, which is not long for a picture of this caliber. I want to go back to New York and see my family, and I don’t want to be worried about what Charlie will do behind my back when I’m gone.”
“The picture will go to the theatres as it is now,” said Jack Warner.13 There are some people never more alarming than when they make you a promise.
Streetcar was released on September 18, 1951, at two hours and two minutes. Cuts were made, as both Warner and Kazan had known they would be. You can say that Kazan felt betrayed, and he was as sensitive to that human trait as any natural betrayer. Kazan had expected it, and he had wanted to make the movie. It’s a good picture and our fullest record of that historic production. Vivien Leigh is fragile in it, yet she holds her own with Brando’s lunging energy. The prisoner is finally more interesting than the captor. Streetcar was nominated for twelve Oscars: it won for Leigh, for Karl Malden and Kim Hunter, and for the art direction. The film earned $8 million eventually on a cost of $1.8 million. What else do you want? The film of Streetcar was a compromise, but in the eyes of Jack Warner, that was a happy ending.
How else are movies made? The affronted artist needs someone to blame for his own compromise, and Jack was perfect casting in that part. What happened to Kazan’s uneasy trust reminds me of a story told by the writer and screenwriter Niven Busch.
John Wayne went to Warners, and he never made failures, but there he was in red ink! It was kind of a put-down to him. He knew there was skullduggery, so he wouldn’t speak to Jack Warner. He said, “Don’t even mention his name!” For a couple of years if he saw Warner at a benefit, he’d walk out. He couldn’t speak to him in a parking lot. Finally at some party Warner corners Wayne. He sticks out his hand and says, “Duke, you’ve been avoiding me.” Wayne says, “That’s right.” “What happened, Duke? What went wrong?” Duke says, “Jack, it’s very simple; you screwed me.” Warner says, “Duke, I know, but that would have happened anyway. And we’re your friends.”14
What else did you expect? If Kazan had been betrayed by Jack Warner over twelve minutes on Streetcar, he still went back to him with the plea to make East of Eden.
As for Wayne, he was one of those actors who formed his own company, Batjac, releasing his pictures through Warners. That led to a group of intriguing films, including The High and the Mighty, Hondo, Track of the Cat, and eventually The Searchers, made by John Ford.
East of Eden may be the best film Kazan ever made, and many believe The Searchers was the peak of John Wayne’s career. The one is an unguarded parable of fraternal rivalry, with one brother sent away so that another can rule, and the other is the story of a loner brother who goes to the ends of the earth to be avenged, who thinks of killing his defiled niece, and who harbors guilt because he loved—and maybe even had for a moment—his own brother’s wife.
These are films made at Warner Brothers as the studio business was coming apart, and they provide oblique insight into what can drive a brother. They are both stories in which we become emotionally attached to tyrants of sentiment who behave with unbridled selfishness, and self-pity, in the name of wish fulfillment. At the end of The Searchers, the door closes on Ethan Edwards, shutting him out of the homestead and committing him to the desert. It is a just verdict on a man not quite fit for company. But our hearts go with him, out there, into a lonely place where fantasy prevails. One might grow up a little unbalanced on films like these. You have to allow that Jack was a little crazy.
Jack Warner himself
17
Jacob’s Ladder
IN 1955, Hirsch was seventy-three, Aaron was seventy, and Jacob was sixty-two. Schmuel had been dead twenty-eight years in October, and he was the brother the other three loved, for he had died to make them great, and famous, and rich. Schmuel had become Sam, Aaron was Albert, Hirsch was Harry, and Jacob was Jack. When kids in the family asked Jack what the original family surname had been, he said he could no longer remember. They had become Warner Bros. But if anyone needed to ask, they went to Jack. Not only was he younger; he was in charge, in California, running the studio, a grinning dinosaur from old Hollywood.
Harry had always been the oldest and the firmest. He said he was a simple, honest man who believed in the family, its heritage, and all the old stories. He had been like a father to them. He lived in New York, and he was the president of the company. He had been true to his wife, Lea, and he had had three children—Lewis, who died in his twenties, and two daughters, Doris and Betty. Doris had married two directors, one at a time, Mervyn LeRoy and Charles Vidor, and Betty had married a young assistant in the company, Milton Sperling. Harry was doing all he could to stay in charge of the business and the family, which meant that every day and night he grieved over the wayward energies and attitudes of his kid brother, Jack.
Albert was, by every account, the most ordinary and habitual of men, without much in the way of personality or ambition. It was his single desire to live in Florida with his wife, Bessie. This was his second wife Bessie, the first having died of influenza. He had had no children. Albert’s pleasure in life was to live simply and to go to the track. These things were aided by living in Miami. But he was also the treasurer of the company. It was said of him, “He was not a man who would hold back from belching at the table.”1 If he had people for dinner, he would be first at the table; he might sit down and start to eat before the guests were seated. He liked to study the racing form and watch Westerns on television. And if he had to go to New York, he would sit in his office and read the numbers.
Jack lived in Los Angeles, and he was the head of production at Warner Bros. He had seen essential assistants, Darryl Zanuck and Hal Wallis, walk away because they couldn’t stand him, and he had decided that they had not been essential. He ran more and more of the show himself, just as he had hired nearly everyone on the lot. In turn, those people endured or despised him. They called him bad names; they sometimes fought with him in the courts; they rarely trusted him; but they did agree that more or less Jack ran the show and had the hunches and the luck that made it work. It was said he could assess a script in just a few minutes without reading the whole thing. All you had to do with Jack was live with his smile, his restlessness, his boasts, his corny jokes, and his urge to sing to you—and watch your back, because Jack might do anything to you, if only because you were his friend.
Just thank God you weren’t his brother.
He had a grand house on Angelo Drive, where he lived with his wife, Ann.2 She had made the house like a southern mansion, with a hint of Monticello, wrought-iron gates, a golf course, and a Versailles parquet floor. The house was Ann’s production. It turned out that a lot of the antiques were fake, made to order at the Warners art department.
To remind you, Ann was Jack’s second wife; he was her second husband. First of all, Jack had been married to Irma, and they had had a son, Jack Jr., born in 1916. But Jack had drifted from his duty; he had been unfaithful many times, and he had found Ann Boyar Page, who already had a daughter, Joy. Jack and Ann had begun their affair in about 1933, and they had a daughter, Barbara, in 1934—they were not actually married until 1936.
The affair, and the other affairs in Jack’s career, as well as the divorce and the illegitimate child, had horrified Harry. Such things only confirmed the lack of character and reliability he had detected in Jack from an early age. As a result, Harry was not just disapproving of Ann, but inclined to ignore her. And since he was the declared head of the family, his attitude prevailed as something like an orthodoxy. The person most trapped in this situation was Jack Jr. He loved his mother and his father, and he tried to show respect for Ann. But his stepmother did not trust him, and she made it plain to Jack that he should be equally suspicious. So Jack Jr. was hired for a time at the studio, but then his own father told him to get out. He was rehired, and then fired again. Jack and Harry had a kind of mutual hatred that only brothers understand. For Jack to be disapproved of and disdained was the gravest injury. Harry was going to have to be punished.
Warner Bros had been a great factory system, and in the first years after the war it had flourished. But then the business deteriorated rapidly. This malaise went across the entire industry. Warners resisted better than any other studio.
They were still making a range of high-class entertainment: they let John Huston go to Mexico to shoot a yarn about chasing gold, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, with Bogart, Walter Huston, and Tim Holt (both Hustons won Oscars); Life with Father, a popular family story with William Powell and Irene Dunne; The Fountainhead, for which the studio had allowed Ayn Rand to write her own screenplay, with Gary Cooper as the intransigent architect (he was Rand’s choice when the studio had wanted Bogart); The Flame and the Arrow, for which they had made a deal with Burt Lancaster’s production company to have Burt as a Robin Hood–like figure in old Lombardy; and Captain Horatio Hornblower, directed by Raoul Walsh, with Gregory Peck as a rather repressed English sea captain fighting Napoleon (Virginia Mayo played the female lead in both these adventures). There was also Strangers on a Train, a timely revival of Alfred Hitchcock’s career after a few flops, in which Robert Walker gives one of the great performances in a Warners film.
The studio grasped the unruly phenomenon of James Dean, and had done his three pictures—East of Eden; Rebel Without a Cause, where Jack himself had believed enough in Dean to replace the early black-and-white footage with color; and Giant, more sprawling than the title promised, but earning $39 million on a cost of $6 million. Director George Stevens had wanted Alan Ladd in Dean’s part, but Jack stood out for the difficult kid.
Warners had embraced Sid Luft’s attempt to rescue the career of his wife, Judy Garland, in A Star Is Born (1954), when that venture relied on Judy being credible as an ingénue lead at thirty-two. The picture had wonders, but Jack had told his people to drop some of them, to make it shorter—and still it had been classified as a failure. They had made The Bad Seed (1956), with Patty McCormack starring and Mervyn LeRoy directing, which is still one of the blackest movies ever made about an American child. Warners risked Baby Doll, from Tennessee Williams, with Carroll Baker sucking her thumb in a broken crib for a film condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency. But more and more of us longed to be condemned.
It was still a brave studio. But by 1954, no one could miss the decline of the picture business or fail to see that Warner Bros remained a rich asset likely to lose value in the years ahead, even if the brothers had not been as old as they were, as out of touch, or as inclined to go to the races.
So what happened was businesslike, sensible, and predictable. But that wasn’t enough. It had passion, too, malice and triumph. Jack began to suggest cashing out, taking the bounty that founding brothers deserved, and moving into what could be called retirement. Even Harry allowed that that might be a good idea. So Jack talked to an old ally, the Boston banker Serge Semenenko, about a scheme to buy out the partners. In the early summer of 1956, the brothers sold ninety percent of their stock to the Semenenko syndicate, with assurances to one another that they would all be out of there. Harry was suspicious. He was always wary of Jack, and he could tell that the kid’s spirit was no less cunning than it had ever been. He was still having affairs with young women, and Ann, who had been his mistress once herself, could detect his old pattern of faithless behavior. I suspect Harry guessed what was coming.3
Jack had made a secret deal with Semenenko whereby, once the deal was done, he would reemerge, repurchase his own shares and more, and declare himself president of Warner Bros. Harry would be shafted, Jack would be in charge.
There was no fraud, no crime. It was more personal than that. The three brothers would share $22 million from the sale. This was a matter not of money but of power and control. There are different family versions of what happened, and of the degree of surprise. But most of them include heavy foreboding on Harry’s part. They also see the transaction as a movie story. The news broke that Jack had bought back in, and that he would be the new president. Seeing the newspaper headline, “Harry turned pale. He dropped the paper, grabbed the edge of the table, and fell to the floor.”4 He was taken to the hospital for observation—it was a heart attack, it was a stroke? It was a coup and a collapse. Rea Warner said that Jack might as well have put a gun to her Harry’s head.5
Apparently, Harry came away with $8 million, but he suffered a series of strokes. On August 23, 1957, Harry and Rea celebrated their golden wedding anniversary. There was a party. Everyone was there, Jack Jr. included, but no one was certain Jack would show up. Jack Jr. gave an account of what followed.
I was sitting in the living room with Harry when to my surprise the door swung open to admit my father. He bounced into the room exuding good cheer and jollity, his unnaturally black hair and thin mustache glistening. He stepped close to his brother and tried to say something of little consequence. Hoping Harry would perhaps notice him. Harry did notice . . . and he did the only thing he could still do. He closed his eyes tightly, shutting his brother from sight—and two big tears slowly rolled down his sunken cheeks. My father suddenly stopped speaking, stood stiffly in front of his brother, who had communicated in the only way left to him. Then, with his face suddenly gone bright red, my father turned and almost ran out of the silent room. I reached over to hold my uncle’s hand for a while until the tears stopped.6
Harry died on July 27, 1958, of a cerebral occlusion. He was seventy-six. There was a big funeral, but Jack was at his house in Antibes, and he sent a message saying he could not attend. Rea spoke out at the funeral. “Harry didn’t die,” she said. “Jack killed him.”7 There are close-up lines that people need to say, which others wait to hear. They are the heritage of movie melodrama, and why should the family that had created Bette Davis not be ready to utter such a line? How long had they waited to be heard?
A few nights later, still in the south of France, Jack left the Cannes casino in the early hours of the morning. He was in the habit of gambling more and more, and no one knows how he fared there. But he would play most nights, and he told anyone who asked that he had broken even. That night, at around 2 a.m., Jack crashed his car, an Alfa Romeo, into a truck. He was thrown forty feet out of his car and remained in a coma for several days.8 Jack Jr. hurried to the south of France to be with him, but then it was said that the son caused grave offense by not seeing Ann Warner first and by telling the press that his father might die. Jack recovered, and that’s when he fired Jack Jr. for the second time.
When he got back in Los Angeles, Jack Warner was in sole charge of a famed movie studio that—as he had warned his brothers—was going bust. Once there, he did not exercise the same close control. He had associates who did a lot of the managing for him. The most notable of these was Steve Trilling, who had been at the studio since the late 1920s.
By the 1950s, it was reckoned by insiders that no one handled Jack better than Trilling. He “ran the business of Warner Bros,” observed the actor L. Q. Jones. “Jack Warner gave bad speeches and insulted people; Steve Trilling saw that A, B and C got done.” Until one day, with Jack in France again, Trilling drove up to the studio gate and was told he could not enter. He had been fired. Everyone agreed he had given his life to the company. He committed suicide a couple of years later.9
Jack also appointed William T. Orr (who was married to Joy Page, his wife’s daughter from her first marriage) to head a new television division. That was an area of entertainment that Warners had been neglecting, but Orr was an industrious executive who launched series like Route 66, Cheyenne, and Maverick, which were important new sources of revenue and which made use of a Burbank studio that had fewer films to make.
In the early sixties, one film shone a toxic light on what was happening to the romance of movies. The director Robert Aldrich heard of a novel by Henry Farrell, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?10 It was about the Hudson sisters, movie stars once, who had grown up deadly rivals, living on some mysterious past grievance, cut off from reality in their decaying mansion. It was Sunset Blvd on the brink of being a horror film. Aldrich bought the rights, set a script in motion, and offered one of the parts to Joan Crawford (he had directed her a few years earlier in Autumn Leaves). Crawford saw the point immediately and guessed that Bette Davis was the obvious casting to play her sister.
